Lifefin: Escaping Mempool Explosions in DAG-based BFT

TL;DR

Lifefin is a self-stabilizing protocol that enhances DAG-based BFT protocols by preventing mempool explosions, ensuring liveness, and maintaining high throughput with minimal overhead.

Contribution

Lifefin introduces a generic ACS-based mechanism to prevent mempool explosions in DAG-based BFT protocols, improving their robustness and liveness.

Findings

Lifefin effectively prevents mempool explosions in tested protocols.

Integration of Lifefin maintains high throughput with minimal latency increase.

Lifefin enhances protocol resilience against adversarial attacks.

Abstract

Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) protocols have emerged as promising solutions for high-throughput blockchains. By decoupling data dissemination from transaction ordering and constructing a well-connected DAG in the mempool, these protocols enable zero-message ordering and implicit view changes. However, we identify a fundamental liveness vulnerability: an adversary can trigger mempool explosions to prevent transaction commitment, ultimately compromising the protocol's liveness. In response, this work presents Lifefin, a generic and self-stabilizing protocol designed to integrate seamlessly with existing DAG-based BFT protocols and circumvent such vulnerabilities. Lifefin leverages the Agreement on Common Subset (ACS) mechanism, allowing nodes to escape mempool explosions by committing transactions with bounded resource usage even in adverse conditions. As a result, Lifefin imposes (almost) zero overhead in typical cases while effectively eliminating liveness vulnerabilities. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Lifefin, we integrate it into two state-of-the-art DAG-based BFT protocols, Sailfish and Mysticeti, resulting in two enhanced variants: Sailfish-Lifefin and Mysticeti-Lifefin. We implement these variants and compare them with the original Sailfish and Mysticeti systems. Our evaluation demonstrates that Lifefin achieves comparable transaction throughput while introducing only minimal additional latency to resist similar attacks.